In the Sunday Times Bryan Appleyard reviews a clutch of books - Melanie Phillips's among them - about 7/7, its causes and consequences. A story, in part, of old-fashioned complacency:
Overall, Tulloch apart, these books make plain that the British official response to Islamic radicalism at every level has been inept and ill-judged. This may be a conspiracy, a cock-up or a symptom of our own decadence, but it is plainly a disaster. However, if we are truly speaking about causes, there is one huge factor that is left out of all these accounts — the condition of the Arab states that have incubated this evil ideology as a convenient way of distracting their under-employed young men from the gross spectacle of their own cynicism, brutality and corruption. But that is another book, another truth. For the moment, impure and complex, our truth is that we blew it.
As for the false alarm in Forest Gate, Telegraph columnist Philip Johnston thinks we've returned to our old habit of forgetting where the real threat lies. It's not the police state, stupid:
It is now routinely claimed that 250 armed police officers stormed their way into the house. This is rubbish. Most of the police involved were carrying out cordon duties.
The usual small unit of anti-terror specialists went into what they imagined was a building containing a dangerous bomb. Would you want to do that job? Or would you have liked to crawl through the mangled Tube carriages wrecked by last July's bombers, in the dust and fetid heat of high summer, looking for clues that might point to the perpetrators?
I'm glad I'm not alone in being irritated by the media's constant misuse of the C-word:
In recent days, it was impossible to listen to BBC news without hearing a procession of spokesmen for what was referred to as "the community" condemning the police action in east London, without any apparent attempt to place it in the context of the threat we face. What is this "community"? Are we all members of it, or does it just exist for a particular group?